The 13th-16th September will see hundreds of Greens from across the country descend on Brighton for the party’s Autumn Conference. And from the look of what’s made the final agenda, it’s shaping up to be an interesting and radical one, further entrenching the party’s position as a significant force for progress in British politics. For […]

Refuse workers in Brighton have declared an end to their industrial action after the council leadership backed down in a dispute which rocked the UK’s only administration run by Green party councillors. The Brighton Argus is reporting that 60% of the workers voted to accept a new deal, details of which have yet to emerge. […]

The CWU Scotland No 2 Branch has voted to back a yes vote in the independence referendum next year. The union, which covers postal workers in the Stirling, Edinburgh, Fife and Falkirk, has voted to play an active role in the campaign for Scottish independence. The vote is symbolic because it is the first union […]

Luke Martell Jérémie Bédard-Wien from the Quebec students’ union CLASSE has been on tour in England, telling his story about the movement at home against fees and for public education. The Quebec mobilisation has been large, radical and sustained. It’s combined students from the bottom up and reached out to unions. It was confronted by […]

As the dispute continues in Marikana, and appears, if anything, to be spreading to both other platinum mines and to more and more workers at Lonmin, perhaps it’s worth taking a step back from the immediate actions and considering the broader economic effect of the strikes. Before we do, however, a brief overview of the […]

Yes, it has come to this – an unemployed man in Birmingham has set fire to himself outside a job centre. The exact context of his self-immolation is not yet known, and no doubt the government, if they say anything, will talk about tragic personal circumstances, about how they shouldn’t comment on individual cases. And […]

The analogy is obvious. I suppose it isn’t surprising: when an official opposition is visionless, it is the grassroots who lead. But when it comes to elections, it is still the visionless opposition on the ballot. This morning, we woke up to the news that Scott Walker has clung onto his job in Wisconsin. The […]

A few days ago, I was disappointed to hear that Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison – my trade union – has been appointed as a non-executive director of the Bank of England. As the leader of one of the UK’s largest trade unions, Prentis is involved in ongoing negotiations over proposed changes to […]

Yesterday the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) held a special conference to determine where we go next in our pensions dispute. For those who haven’t been following the intricacies of it all I’ll attempt to briefly lay out where we were going into this meeting. UCU represents academic and what’s known as academic related staff […]

It took me a while to think of who to nominate for 2011’s Dick of the Year award; there have been a lot of good candidates: Jeremy Clarkson, David Starkey, Jean Quan, Johann Hari, everyone who scabbed on N30, Occupy Glasgow,… But in the end I settled on (Governor of the Year) Scott Walker. Scott, for […]